Three Years
by JasperCanBiteMeAnyday
Summary: Three years after Edward leaves Bella broken in the forest, she discovers the trinkets of her relationship with him hidden beneath her floorboards. A one-shot about the dismal years after Edward leaves if he never returned and what Bella would think if she discovered what he had put right under her feet.


I toss my bag dejectedly onto the kitchen counter and kick off my shoes. My body collapses into the sofa and my aching joints and strained muscles thank me for the relief. I feel like I've been driving for days when it's really only been a few hours. Driving tends to feel much longer when you are too screwed up to be able to listen to music and your own thoughts are unwelcome company.

After several minutes of lying there with my arm shielding my eyes from the greenish light filtering in through the windows, the ticking of the seconds by the clock hanging on the wall finally gets to me just like it always does. It's a constant reminder of time flowing on while I'm still stuck three years in the past. Time stopped moving on for me the day after my eighteenth birthday. But I can't ever bring myself to get rid of that old clock; I haven't changed a thing about this house. Every piece of furniture sits exactly where it always has. Even the annoyingly chipper yellow paint remains in the kitchen.

I grab the remote and turn on ESPN. Not because I like it, I can't even watch television anymore, but because I need the background noise to prevent me from going insane amidst the deafening silence of this empty house. Plus I can pretend that Charlie is laying on the sofa enjoying the sports broadcast as I go in the kitchen to order a pizza considering the fridge and cabinets are entirely bare.

As I dial the number to the pizza parlor, my fingers itch to dial Jake's number. I just want to hear another voice, to feel like I'm not completely alone in this huge world. But my friendship with Jacob dissolved years ago. I loved Jake, but never in the way he wanted. The day before I was supposed to leave for college, he professed his love for me while we were sitting on a piece of driftwood at the La Push beach.

Everything in me told me I should love him. Jake is perfect for me – he is warm and good and made me forget. But I knew that even if I gave him a chance, I would never stop yearning for someone else. Every single time his warm lips pressed against mine, I knew that my heart would cry out for a much colder pair of lips. It wasn't fair to him to let him love me unconditionally and yet to always love him second to someone who wasn't even in my life anymore. It just wasn't fair. I tried to force myself to love Jake just as much as he loved me, but I couldn't.

So when I told him I wasn't ready, he became angry. I expected nothing less. I mean, he had poured so much of his time and devotion into our friendship. He had been so patient and tolerant with me and my craziness. But despite all that, I couldn't give him the one and only thing he wanted from me: to feel about him the way he felt about me.

Distance further crushed our relationship. When I came back to visit in the fall, I know that Charlie must have told Billy at least a dozen times who must have told Jacob several times as well, but I didn't get a single phone call from him. I accepted that. I wasn't going to force Jacob to remain friends with me if it made him unhappy. I am damaged and it isn't his responsibility to fix me.

The last time I saw Jacob was five months ago at Charlie's funeral. He stared at me with those big, brown, puppy-dog eyes brimming with tears. No words were spoken, he just enveloped me in a hug for what felt like seconds but must have been at least five minutes.

When Charlie died of a heart attack, I felt the only real emotions I had felt in a while. After I went to the best college I could manage to get into (my grades had slipped a lot my senior year of high school) a few towns away, a very heavy numbness settled over me like the first winter snow. I didn't have Charlie to watch after, I didn't have Jake to be my personal sun, I didn't have all the constant physical reminders of _them_ surrounding me such as Forks high and my bedroom, and I was too focused on my studies to continue my thrill seeking to allow me to see _him_. Whenever I would come to visit Charlie (which became a rarer and rarer occasion as the months and then years passed considering I found it easier on my mental and emotional stability to stay in one place instead of ping-ponging back and forth) I became more and more a shell. Before I left, he could see the pain and suffering in my eyes. With every visit, all emotion seemed to have receded more. I was nothing. It was as if you could knock on my stomach and be met with an echo.

Charlie gave up on me after two years. He was heartbroken for me. And I imagine all the pizza and grease-filled nights at the diner without me home to cook for him didn't help his health much. He died peacefully in his sleep, which is my only condolence. I hold myself severely accountable for his death. I welcome the grief and guilt. At least it's something.

Charlie left me everything in his will – his house, his belongings, his assets. The college fund he had started for me when I was a baby is still getting me through college or else I probably would have dropped out by now. The only reason I'm there is because he wanted me to go so badly and after all I had put him through I just couldn't refuse. Besides, what else did I have to do? Stay here and work in the Newton's store for the rest of my life?

I realize I've been standing with the phone in my hand staring blankly at the numbers for so long that the phone is making shrill shrieks at me. I quickly set it back down, no longer in the mood to eat.

I trudge up the creaky stairs and into my room. Charlie's room is bigger and nicer, but as if I'm going to sleep in the same place my father died. It's hard enough just to sleep down the hall.

I throw my bag in my room, not bothering to care when my textbooks go sliding across the floor, and head into the bathroom. When I return a minute later, my two left feet manage to trip themselves up over the bulky bag and the scattered textbooks. Even having known those blockages were there, I still found a way to face plant into the floor.

I lie on my stomach on the floor for a few minutes, too lackadaisical to find the will to pull myself up. These days it feels like I'm living my life facedown on the floor.

As I'm lying there, I notice something slightly peculiar. One of my floorboards is raised higher than all the rest of them. It's right in the middle of my room so I don't know how I never noticed it before. I usually notice little imperfections like that. At least I used to, before he left and irregularities lost their intrigue.

I scoot myself forward along the floor like a pathetic child and use my hands to try to force the floor board down into place. But it springs right back up in protest. Stupid thing. Why can't it just be like the others? Why can't it just stay down and do what it's meant to do? Why does it have to be different and stubborn?

I lift it up to find the source of its agitation. Instead, I find something I had never dreamed I would see again.

Sitting in a little bundle is pictures, a CD, and plane tickets that had vanished with him three years ago. My trembling fingers reach out hesitantly, as if it will all disappear if I move too quickly. As soon as my skin touches the shiny plastic of the CD and I let myself realize that it is really real, a frenzy takes over. I scramble to my knees, flinging the floorboard aside, and begin scooping out everything.

I survey my treasures.

The CD that Edward had made me for my birthday. I haven't let his name enter my mind in years. The feeling of it is as real as someone slapping me in the face.

Expired plane tickets that Carlisle and Esme had gotten me for my birthday. Their warm, smiling faces appear in my mind so suddenly I can't block it out. I clutch at my head, trying to force the memories back, but I can't. I've fought it all for too long. Carlisle and Esme were like second parents to me. I loved them. I miss them. Emmett. Jasper. Even Rose. Their pale, beautiful faces appear before me. Alice was- _is_ my best friend. I had never had a girl friend like that before. I miss her. Edward. Edward. I let the name sink in.

"Edward," I whisper, just to try it out. My head begins to pound. I'm overwhelmed with his name being on my tongue again after so long. I miss him. I have never actually thought the words before. But they're there now. I miss Edward. It hurts indescribably to think it yet I can't stop.

A picture of Edward smiling warmly at the camera. My memory did him no justice. His glossy bronze hair, so perfectly messy. His chiseled alabaster features. That loving crooked grin. His amused butterscotch eyes. The searing, white-hot pain rips through my chest. I haven't felt it like this in years. I cry out and hot tears run down my face. I clutch his picture to my chest, sobbing over it. Sobbing over all that I had lost.

The next picture is of Edward and Charlie watching ESPN. Two people that I had loved and lost. I begin choking on my sobs, sounding like some sort of dying animal.

The last picture is of both me and Edward. There's a crease down the middle where I had tried to fold myself out. The crease seems to have been smoothed away, however, and now I am forced to see again how completely and utterly plain I appear next to his beauty. The past three years haven't changed me much at all. My hair has gotten significantly longer, but that's only because I don't care enough to go get it cut. I've gotten thinner because food has no appeal to me anymore and my skin has somehow gotten paler from exhaustion. Other than that, though, I am still the same wide-eyed, plain-Jane, average girl I was when I was eighteen.

I fold the picture once again so it's just him. Only him. Always him.

On shaky legs, I fumble over to the CD player and insert the old CD into it. As my sweet lullaby begins to play, resonating throughout the room, I collapse onto my bed with his picture clutched once more to my chest.

As I stare at his loving expression, I begin to wonder why he would leave all of these things beneath my floorboard. Was it really not even worth his time to burn them or throw them into a ravine?

No. He could've destroyed them with his bare hands in less time than it would have taken him to stash them beneath the floorboard.

Then why do it?

I think back to my days of riding motorcycles and hanging around strange men just to be able to more clearly envision him and hear his angry voice. At the time, I had assumed that my delusions were a result of either insanity or wish fulfillment. But what if there was another reason? One that seems so absurd it never has crossed my mind in the past three years?

My head begins pounding in an effort to repress this newfound epiphany threatening to break free and ruin me. If I let it free and it's wrong, I don't think I will be able to rebound from it.

But I can't stop it. There's another reason why I would have visions of him protecting me and why he would have left these trinkets right here beneath my feet.

Edward Cullen loves me.


End file.
